


meet me at the quarry

by alittlenervous



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, High School, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sexual Humor, but I swear it's lighthearted too, see
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 00:03:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20684153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittlenervous/pseuds/alittlenervous
Summary: “See those stars clustered together up there?” Richie points up at the sky after a brief pause, turning to him.He squints. “Kinda, yeah.”“New constellation, actually. Read all about in the science magazines Mr. Smith keeps on his desk. The name?”He pauses.“Richie’s Enormous Penis.” Eddie groans and shoves him, and he keels over as though he’s been stabbed.---Richie and Eddie are high school seniors. This is a story about Richie's feelings for Eddie, Eddie's obliviousness, his eventual realization, and how they find each other in the face of their past traumas.





	meet me at the quarry

“I’m not getting in that thing. And I’m sure as fuck not letting you drive it either.”

Eddie stares at the brown piece of junk sagging in front of him. It’s a far cry from whatever Richie had called it (a car?) and he stares wearily at it, fully expecting it to fall apart if anyone sits in it. To turn to dust if the wind blows too hard. 

“It’s almost like you don’t trust me or something.” Richie puts a hand on the trunk protectively, staring down at it with loving eyes. “And stop talking shit! You’ll hurt his feelings.”

His? Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. Opens them. Stares again.

Still ugly.

“Whatcha thinking about? It’s a little late, so I don’t blame you for being confused. I usually free up 9 p.m. every night for your mom. Mrs. K been expecting any gentlemen callers lately?” He cocks his hip out and bats his eyes.

Eddie tears his eyes away from the monstrosity long enough to tell him to, “Shut up, Richie.”

“Your mom wouldn’t like that, Eds! She likes the Tozier Tongue Technique.”

Eddie shudders. “You know what? I take back what I said about not letting you drive it. Drive it, far away from here, and die in a fiery crash when the engine explodes or… the tires combust or… whatever happens to cars that make the people inside die.” He turns away from the smug look on Richie’s face and starts back towards the house. His mom must be getting worried. To her, going out for a short walk means Eddie’ll be within shouting distance from the house and back inside it in exactly 8 minutes. He’d even managed to leave without being forced into a coat, what with the fall weather approaching 65 degrees and all. He feels the back of his neck itch and knows that his mom will be out to drag him back inside in the next thirty seconds. 

Richie grabs onto the back of his sweater. 

“I do believe I came heah to give a lift to Sir Kaspbrak foh an appointment at the quarry.” Eddie spins around to see Richie holding the door open for him, bowing slightly at the waist. He glances towards the house and spots his mom peering suspiciously at the two of them.

“I can’t, Rich. My mom-” 

“Come on, you pussy. It’s senior year! Time to live a little!” He beams at Eddie, sending a little wave to his mom in the window, face half-concealed by the curtain. “Hi, Mrs. K!”

Eddie figures he has ten seconds to make a decision. Around second four, extreme disregard for his own personal safety possesses his being, forces it towards the car, crams his body into the passenger’s seat and slams the door shut. 

Richie lets out a whoop and races to the wheel. The engine coughs to life and Eddie winces at the rumbly sound of protest emitting from under his seat. 

“It’s time to pop your new-car cherry, Eds!” Richie yells over the racket.

“Okay, gross, and the only thing I’ve never been exposed to here is the new type of mold that’s probably growing in the air conditioning vents. I think its discovery might be a scientific breakthrough. And don’t call me that.”

“Cleaned him up, just for you.” Richie singsongs as the car rolls out of the driveway. Not a moment later, his mom throws the front door open.

He can’t hear her through the window (and doubts he can get it open), so he does his best to articulate the words, “be back by eleven” and “sorry, mom” with exaggerated lip movements that probably won’t save him from the firm talking-to he’ll definitely get later on about never seeing “that Tozier boy” again for the next million years. 

Aside from the gazebo episode four years before, Eddie kept his rebellions to a minimum. He figured he’d be out of the house soon enough, out of Derry, what with all the colleges he applied to taking him across the country. But he never seemed to be able to fight the feeling of being on edge in his own house. Afraid to sneeze or cough because his mom would take him to the doctor’s if she even sensed a cold or the return of his dreaded “asthma”. She stopped doing it so often after Eddie called her bluff, but the fear stays there like a stain that won’t wash out. 

Richie turns up the volume on a cheesy pop song and he feels a little bit of that old self returning. 

“WHAT IS LOVE,” Richie bellows out the window, having finally gotten it to roll down by utilizing brute force on the crank handle.

“BABY, DON’T HURT ME. DON’T HURT ME. NO MORE.” The wind whips Eddie’s hair around his face. It’s grown out a little longer, revealing a soft curl to his hair that he’s decided he likes. He finds himself making decisions for himself now, more than ever. He leans back against his seat and observes Richie.

Even though he’s still lanky, Richie fits better into himself than he did when they were little. Like at some point, his height caught up to the knobbiness of his knees and his elbows and his shoulders and he didn’t look anything like the disjointed mess he used to be. The edges and hard lines of his jawline, collarbones, arms and hands blend together, cohesive. Kind of graceful.

He still hasn’t ditched the Hawaiian shirts, though. Today, he’s wearing an unbuttoned blue one with his Smiths t-shirt underneath. The combination would look terrible on anyone else, but on Richie, it’s just so… Richie. Random shit thrown together that looks like it would never work, but does. 

Or doesn’t. Eddie looks down at his belted shorts and decides that he shouldn’t be the one doling out fashion advice anyway.

Richie’s voice cracks like hot glass under cold water in the middle of the song, and Eddie makes a joke about the magic of Richie’s changing body that makes him laugh hard enough to almost total the car against a stop sign. 

When they finally get to the quarry, the stars are out and it’s the most beautiful fucking thing Eddie’s ever seen. He walks to the edge of the small cliff and looks up.

Richie follows soon after with two blankets spilling out of his arms. Eddie would help him, but it’s funny to watch him struggle with an ultimately futile task. From a distance, he looks like a moving lint ball that grew legs.

“You’re the one bragging about how much longer your arms are, idiot. Put your money where your mouth is.” 

“The better to tackle you with!” Richie drops the blankets and lunges for him. Eddie shrieks and goes down hard, Richie hanging onto his legs with a death grip. 

“Stop kicking, motherfucker!” 

“I’ll stop when you let go, motherfucker!” 

Eddie rolls onto his side, breathless with laughter. Richie sits up and shakes the dirt from his hair with an even dirtier hand. Eddie calls him gross, and Richie retaliates by tossing a handful of dirt at Eddie’s sneakers.

They sit with their legs dangling over the cliff’s edge, shoulders barely an inch apart. Richie chatters on about something that happened at school, the history teacher that definitely has it out for him, the asshole who won’t give him his pencils back even though he takes one every period they have together (“What am I, made of fucking pencils?”). Eddie interjects with witty remarks, affirmation that the history teacher hates every single one of his students, counters with the fact that, “You stole pencils from me all throughout fifth grade. Consider this payback, you ungrateful bitch.”

Richie considers this thoughtfully for a moment before calling Eddie a dickwad.

“See those stars clustered together up there?” Richie points up at the sky after a brief pause, turning to him. 

He squints. “Kinda, yeah.”

“New constellation, actually. Read all about in the science magazines Mr. Smith keeps on his desk. The name?” 

He pauses. 

“Richie’s Enormous Penis.” Eddie groans and shoves him, and he keels over as though he’s been stabbed. 

That gets the ball rolling, and they come up with imaginative names for the star formations they see, each one a little more amazing, ridiculous and vulgar than the last. The sky is littered with stars, bursting with them, and they blur in front of his eyes until he’s just pointing at random shit and giggling at whatever Richie says.

“Big Vagine,” has him crying into the dirt, convulsing with laughter that’s wild and uninhibited and pulls the ugliest heuheuheu out of the depths of his throat because it’s so stupid he can’t breathe. 

“Real creative, genius,” he wheezes, wiping the tears out of his eyes with his forearm.

Richie flicks a pebble off the cliff. “No, no. You’re the real genius, Eds. Only a couple of months left until you jet off to New York or L.A. and leave us all behind in Derry.” He leans back onto his palms, arms straight, head lolled back on his shoulders.

“No way. You were always smart, you know?” Eddie props a hand under his chin and turns to look at Richie. “We’re both getting out of here.”

A smile tugs at the corners of Richie’s mouth and he glances at Eddie for a split second and then back up at the sky. He doesn’t say anything, though. Eddie feels weird looking at a Richie whose mouth isn’t a second away from being wrapped around his own foot.

So he tries to lighten the mood. “We’re never coming back!” Eddie shouts into the expanse of the quarry. He bumps his shoulder to Richie’s. “Look a little happier, maybe. You won’t even miss it.”

Richie stills. “I don’t know. I’ll miss some things about this place.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “If you make a joke about my mom, Richie, I swear-”

Richie leans forward and presses his lips to his.

What.

The only thing Eddie can focus on is that Richie’s lips are chapped to shit, that he really should have put in more effort if he was going to be putting his mouth on anything, especially if he was planning on putting his mouth on his mouth, seriously, a little Carmex wouldn’t hurt-

But he can’t find it in himself to feel gross about it. 

He kind of likes it. He kind of likes Richie.

Huh.

He leans forward almost imperceptibly, and Richie jerks away and stares at the hand he has splayed over the ground between them.

The only thoughts running through Eddie’s head are of chapstick and lips and wait, Richie likes me? so whatever Richie’s saying sounds muffled even though he’s right in front of him. 

Huh? 

Eddie shifts his entire body on the piece of cliff he’s perched on to face Richie, to hear him better. But sometime between the kiss and now, his brain stopped working and overestimated just how much shifting he could do until he 

Fell

Off.

Eddie watches the horrified expression on Richie’s face grow smaller and smaller as he topples through the air, down, down, down towards the water. 

“Jesus, Eddie, fuck!”

And then, his back comes in contact with what feels like a solid brick wall. And wetness. Cold wetness.

Cold enough to knock him out of his stupor like a sucker punch to the gut. Disoriented and spluttering, he pumps his legs and wipes the water out of his eyes. 

Just as he’s regained feeling in his back, (seriously, ow) something lands next to him, with a mammoth splash that sends a fresh wave of cold over him and into his nose. He thinks about the flesh eating bacteria they learned about in biology, remembers that the quarry doesn’t exactly qualify as “coastal waters”, and then feels dumb because he’s been in this water more times than he’s taken baths. And that’s saying something.

He coughs once and feels significantly less stupid when there isn’t quarry water shoved up his skull six ways from Sunday. 

Richie surfaces beside him ungracefully, long arms windmilling and creating a lot more splashing than Eddie thinks is necessary. He tries to grab his elbow, his wrist, anything to tell him to stop already, Jesus Christ.

“What the fuck?” Richie stops flailing and grabs his shoulders. He keeps himself floating in a way that’s more kicking than treading, and because Eddie’s so close, he ends up kicking him too. He raises his voice when Eddie doesn’t respond, almost frantic. “Are you fucking okay?” 

Eddie watches blankly as Richie rant-asks him more variations of if he’s okay or not and his voice comes out of him in a rush when he realizes that there’s something off with Richie’s face. 

“Your glasses!” Eddie says at the same time as Richie’s “Did you hit your head on anything?”

Richie looks stunned, like it’s improbable that he’d worry about anything else at the moment. “My what?”

“Your glasses! They’re gone!” Eddie spreads his arms out over the water like he can part it if he paddles through it fast enough. He tries to squint through the pitch black. He glances up and sees Richie staring at him and feels vaguely stupid for trying so hard if Richie isn’t going to. “Help me, asshole! They’re yours anyway!”

“Wait, Eddie-”

“What?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” 

Eddie freezes. There’s something serious in his tone. Something familiar and overbearing and threatening and so unexpected that he feels his blood run cold.

“Yes. I’m fine.” It comes out harsher than he expected, and Richie looks a little like he’s been slapped, but Eddie doesn’t care. It stings to be coddled, especially by the one person who’s not supposed to treat him like that. 

Something glints underwater and Eddie plunges down to grab it before Richie can say another word. 

He runs his hand over the gritty bottom of the lake until he feels smooth plastic against his fingers. Grabbing onto them, he comes up triumphantly with the glasses held over his head. “Found them!”

When Richie doesn’t make a move to take them from him, he places the glasses on his face, making sure the temples are safely tucked behind his ears. In the second it takes for him to bring his hands back to his sides, Richie’s hands twitch upwards and stay there. Eddie stares at his pale, upturned palms. 

Suddenly, the memory of the kiss comes back in full force and a blush creeps up his neck as he fights the urge to knock Richie’s glasses off again just so he has an excuse to dunk his face back into the water. 

What the fuck just happened?

Silence presses itself into the air above their heads and the space in Eddie’s lungs, swelling inside of him until he feels his ribs cracking with the pressure. He wonders what it means, whatever this is. 

Everything’s changing.

Richie won’t look at him.

“Let’s go back up,” Richie says with finality. 

And because Eddie doesn’t know what to do with this Richie, serious Richie, he wades to the shallower part by the shore and trudges behind him to where the car is parked.

Richie gets the blankets from where he dropped them and hands one to Eddie wordlessly. 

The drive home is quiet and uncomfortable. 

Eddie wishes the time would pass faster. The fact that Richie hasn’t turned on any music makes him want to pick up a conversation, to say something, but everytime he doesn’t, the anticipation builds up in little blocks that barricade the space between them until they stop in front of Eddie’s house. 

Before he can ask him anything or even think of what to say, Richie decides how the night will end for both of them.

“Bye, Eds.” 

So that’s how it’s going to be. 

Eddie doesn’t know what to think.

**Author's Note:**

> "Tozier Tongue Technique" has been and always will be my greatest literary accomplishment


End file.
